Tomorrow’s Scientists

wheat production but has had implications for many other aspects of agriculture. It also led to setting up one of the first graduate schools for agriculture and science in Latin America. And eventually, after the Nobel Prize, it gave rise to the CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which nowhas 16 centers functioning in different parts of the world, focusing on different crops and animals.

PL: I have a quote here from Bob Chandler [the first director of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines], whom you knewwell. He said, “The Green Revolution would never have happened if Norm Borlaug had not been there to sell the idea.”Howdid you sell it, and whom did you sell it to?

NB: You had to sell it at all levels. When the Mexican program was terminated, there were no plans for it to be continued. The goal was to train a newgeneration of Mexican scientists, and the project was turned over to the team that I trained. I had one year in which to find newpastures, as it were, and I was assigned to travel with the Food and Agriculture Organization across North Africa and the Middle East.

When we moved from Mexico to the Near and Middle East countries, I thought I sawthat some of these wheats—and not just seed but the whole production and crop management interdisciplinaryprogram— would work. I suggested that the Rockefeller Foundation bring a number of young people from those countries to Mexico and work out some sort of deal with myformer trainees, to permit us to train the newgroup. From this came an international yield-testing program. We set up cooperative yield nurserytesting of not onlythe Mexican wheats but also the best varieties from Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Chile, India, Pakistan, and Egypt. When the data came back, we sawthat these Mexican wheats were unique. Certain techniques that we used gave broad adaptation, and this allowed a number of positive traits to be selected.

It opened the door on photoperiodism. We discovered varieties that were insensitive to the daylength when temperature regimes were within reason. Theycould prosper in manyplaces and theyhad good disease resistance.

When India and Pakistan had the hunger crisis and famine in the mid 1960s, the people that reallymoved the technologywere all of these young people that were brought to Mexico for six to nine months. Theyworked not in genetics and plant breeding alone, but in agronomy, soils, irrigation, weed control, learning about farmers’ co-ops, all of that. India and Pakistan were the two outstanding examples, but it had impact to a lesser degree in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, some of the North African countries, and Egypt.

PL: Mexico became your laboratoryin manyways. Were there policies or institutions that fostered that, or was it serendipitous?

NB: When we started the program in Mexico, there were onlytwo scientists in the whole Department of Agriculture there who had ever set foot in a graduate school, so we started out bytraining a newgeneration of agricultural scientists. There were manygraduates, but it was book learning. There were no experiment stations that functioned, so we set up the whole thing. There was no extension service to move the newtechnology, so when we thought we had something worthwhile, we moved onto the farms and set up the demonstration plots. It was an ongoing training period. I suppose we trained 700 Mexican scientists at some level—150 or so during that period starting in 1943.

PL: The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to you as much for your humanitarian work as for your science. What led you to step out of the laboratory, out of the field, and become a hunger fighter for the world?

NB: In Mexico, this was sort of the theme of the whole program: results that could be measured byfilling empty stomachs. This became a driving force. The spirit to win this battle was incorporated into all the young people, first in Mexico, then much later in the sixties and seventies in manycountries through the training program.

PL: In the 1960s, you used traditional breeding methods to develop these wheat varieties, but the scientific landscape has changed dramatically. What tools do you see as being important for future agriculture?

NB: Of course, nowwe can take a gene from an entirely different taxonomic group. In our conventional breeding, we couldn’t bridge the sterilitygaps—if you tried to cross plants from a different genus it wouldn’t work in most cases. But nowyou can cross even from a kingdom, such as taking out a gene from the ubiquitous soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and putting it into corn and cotton to control certain insects. It’s curious that in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring she was recommending the use of Bt that was grown in culture, put in suspension, and sprayed. But nowthat the gene that controls it has been put into improved corn and cotton varieties, some people sayit must be dangerous. It reduces the amount of insecticide that’s needed—it’s serving a veryuseful purpose in manyparts of the world.

PL: We have so manyconflicts between agricultural and environmental interests. Howdo we bridge this?

NB: If you look at what’s happened in the application of improved science and technologyto increase world cereal production in the last 50 years, this is the picture:

Production was about 680 million tons of all the different grains worldwide in the year 1950. In the year 2000, it was about two billion tons, so it has roughlytripled. Had we tried to produce the year 2000 harvest with 1950s technology, we would have had to have cultivated more than another billion hectares of land of the same quality. Using technologysaved land for Mother Nature, for forestry, for wildlife habitat, for biodiversity.

PL: Both your current institution—Texas A&M University—and Berkeleyare land-grant institutions. What role do you see for land-grant universities for the future in agriculture?

NB: Land-grant universities have played a vital role in the development of agriculture here in the United States. Theyestablished a model that was in part transplanted to India and Pakistan during the time I was working there. Before World War II, most of the research was done

Beahrs ELP Alumnus Takes Borlaug’s Message Home

Norman Borlaug visited Berkeley to speak with the 40 participants in the third Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program.The three-week summer program was established at the campus’s Center for Sustainable Resource Development with a $1 million gift from UC Berkeley alumni Richard and Carolyn Beahrs. The program brings together environmentalists and policy makers from around the world to tackle problems of natural resource management.

Dr. Yanuariadi Tetra, a 2003 ELP participant from the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry,was so inspired by Borlaug’s visit that he spread the message in an August 9 article in Kompas, Indonesia’s largest-circulation newspaper.

In his article,Tetra wrote that the style and content of Dr.Borlaug’s lecture “hypnotized the audience and created a solidarity of spirit among all to empathize with hungry people all over the world.” in the land-grant universities or the USDA experiment stations. Theywere also the agencies that moved research to farmers’fields through the Cooperative Extension Service. After World War II, the private sector began assuming much of the responsibility. But there’s one danger in this rapid movement of all of food production and agriculture, research, and extension going to the private sector: Who is going to train the next generation of scientists? Is it going to be done in the private sector? I plead stronglythat even with the newbiotechnology there needs to be good public-sector programs that continue to train newgenerations of scientists that the private sector will need.

I’m also concerned that manypeople don’t understand howlong it took our own countryto get where we are in production of basic food and fiber—this wasn’t done overnight. I plead that we tryin the developing nations to

Tetra went on to respond to critics of chemical agriculture and biotechnology who are concerned about negative impacts on biodiversity and forest cover.He used Salinas Valley—a field trip he took as part of the ELP—as an example.

Salinas Valley provides 80 percent of the lettuce grown in the U.S.A.,and also exports to Canada,Europe, Japan,China and Indonesia.The rental price per acre of land is $1,700 to $2,250 because of this very high productivity made possible through the wise use of inputs,” Tetra wrote.

“Many people attack chemical inputs and promote organic farming because it’s better for health and the environment,but Dr.Borlaug says ‘there is no proof that non-chemical ways can supply food for 6 billion people in the world.’”

“The moral message from Dr.Borlaug that is relevant for us all is that decision makers have to empathize with the condition of hungry people.When the problem of poverty and hunger is discussed in many forums,people who participate are not people who have ever felt hunger but they worry about the chemical inputs,”Tetra continued.

“In Indonesia,it is usual that in the dry season peasants have no access to water and their fields go fallow. The answer from the second Green Revolution is biotechnology, chemical inputs,and policy changes that enable our nations to access and adopt these technologies.” leave them some pattern of strong public sector support because it’s impossible for the private sector to move into these countries and make big investments. It’s a slow, painful process.

PL: One thing that comes through in manyof your answers is the role of interdisciplinaryresearch, and you have certainlypracticed that. Howdo we best promote interdisciplinaryresearch?

NB: I think it has to go back to earlyin our educational process. It has to start in our high schools, to give students a good feel for howthings interact—chemistry, physics, mathematics, and biology. For undergraduates, I saytake history, social sciences, biological sciences, chemistry, and physics during the first two years, so that you develop an appreciation that these things are not simple. I don’t think we’re doing a verygood job at that. We get too manypeople specializing too early. We need specialists—the best that we can produce—but who is going to produce the ones that knowhowto take those pieces and put them together to produce a technology that will help solve some of these food, fiber, and forestry problems?

PL: Here at Berkeleywe’re trying to devise a structure to better organize our interdisciplinarystudies in the environment. What advice do you have for us?

NB: When you’re talking about the environment, take a look at agriculture, forestry, wildlife, and what’s happening to the basic resources on which the environment is built—the soil, all of the problems you have to deal with to bring stabilityinto the food and fiber system, howto control diseases and insects. All of this has to be given to individuals who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, who are going to integrate all of this newknowledge.

PL: You’re here at Berkeleyto visit the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program, a program that brings mid-career professionals from around the world together to discuss these issues. What advice do you have for them, and what role will this program playin the future?

NB: I think this type of program is verynecessary. There’s too much conflict between disciplines. For example, I consider myself an environmentalist. Manywould sayno, you’re spoiling the environment, but I’m interested not just in agriculture but also forestryand wildlife. I run into too manypeople who don’t understand how tightlythese are, or should be, woven together for the benefit of mankind in the broadest sense.

The population monster has a bearing on everything we’ve been talking about. When I was born, in 1914, the world population was about 1.6 billion. Nowwe’re at 6.2 billion, and adding 80 million more a year. Most of those

80 million are unfortunatelybeing added in countries that are least able to give them basic necessities of life: food, shelter, education, public health. In the industrial nations, starting with ours, the population has leveled off. Even though the projections showthat we’re supposed to level off in the developing nations, I’m still worried about the population monster in those countries.

PL: Are you optimistic about our abilityto feed the world’s population in the future?

NB: Yes! In myNobel acceptance speech and lecture, I said that we then had the technologyto produce the food that would be needed for the next three generations.

This is production. The problem of equitable distribution is another matter. NowI say, from the standpoint of production, we have the technologyavailable nowor in the research pipelines to produce the food that will be needed for 10 billion, without destroying the environment. But I hope that 10 billion won’t come until 2100 or some long distance down the road. So we’ve got a big job to do. And education is the primaryconsideration in the Third World.

You can viewthis interviewand a lecture that Dr. Borlaug presented to UC Berkeleyonline at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/details.html?event_id=86.